Category: Crowdfunding

We are currently looking for donations to cover the costs of printing and distribution of our upcoming anthology, CBA vol 38|39: FRAGMENTS.

In this double issue, various artists present their own fractal visions under the common concept of FRAGMENTS.
Also, for the first time in years, we include texts in this volume. But we need your help to make all this possible!

CBA vol 38|39 features comics by Marie Jacotey-Voyatzis, Martin López Lam, Stefan Petrini, Rakel Stammer, Diego Shim, Henrik Rogowski, Victor Expolio, Insulina Kid, Mattias Elftorp and Gonzalo de las Heras, and texts by Mattias Elftorp and Saskia Gullstrand with Johanna Rojola and possibly some additional material in this more-than-a-hundred colorful pages issue. Both the cover and the issue is compiled by Christina Cromnow of the CBK editorial crew, who is currently working on her debut graphic novel.

All the comics in the volume are already finished. We only need to put the whole volume together and do some final editing before sending it to print.

You can support this project via our campaign at Indiegogo where you can also see some sample comic pages from the book.
Please note that the campaign ends on December 16!

We are happy to announce that even though we didn’t reach the goal we had set on Indiegogo, we still managed to cover almost the entire printing cost for CBA vol 36|37. It helped a lot that we found a new, cheaper printing house and that we got some big donations in the last days of the campaign. There are still some issues such as rent and distribution costs, but those are later concerns.

We’ve had some questions as to the story behind our decision to try crowdfunding for the new volume (by the way, please help fund us!). Why we lost the magazine support (“Kulturtidskriftstöd”) from the Arts Council. So here’s the story:

The previous CBK crew (ca 2012-2014) had this idea of publishing every other volume of CBA as a stand-alone graphic novel with one creator doing the entire book. The first one was CBA vol 23: All Saints by Marcel Ruiters, published in 2013.

In November of 2014, that crew didn’t work anymore for various reasons, and more or less decided to shut down CBK. One of the crew members who didn’t want it to die went to the comics school to invite anyone from there who would be interested in taking over to come to a meeting. They also made a general invitation/call for help. So a bunch of people from the school and some others (like one of the original founders who had left a few years previously) came to this crisis meeting.

Because of the abrupt end to the former crew, they left some loose ends for the new one to tidy up. One of those were the publication of the last few graphic novel volumes (vol 29, 31 and 33, the last one of which came out in 2016).

The thing is that CBA had had this “kulturtidskriftstöd” since 2005(?), and when we applied again for 2016, we got rejected. The explanation was that CBA had turned into something that was less of a magazine, and they thought we should apply for litterature support instead, for the separate issues as separate books.

So we tried that, but with no success. Another problem is that the litterature support is applied after the fact, so you still need to have the money for printing etc before hand. So we really wanted to get the “kulturtidskriftstöd” back. After a meeting with a representative for the Arts Council, we thought we had understood what to do to get it back; we stopped with the graphic novel volumes and returned to a pure anthology like it was before, with 4 issues/year.

We thought that it’d be a one year step back, but that now we had made amends and solved the problem. But no. Another rejection. This time because we were “too much of an anthology and not enough of a magazine”. Which was kind of a shock since the difference between now and all those years when we got the support was negligible.

We will make another try in the application for 2018, to add more text material that’s relevant to the subjects we’re working with, and to the comics scene that we’re a part of. It’s an ongoing process and a balance between what we want to do and what our readers want and what might give us money, and we may end up in some other direction along the way. We’ll stay true to our ideals while trying to adapt and then we’ll see what works out.

And in the meantime we still need to finance this year’s publications (and rent, somehow), so now we’re trying out crowdfunding as an alternative.

So now you know a bit more about the current situation, along with some hints of where we might be going in the futurte. If you want to be part of the crowdfunding, go to the Indiegogo campaign page.

And if you want to help but don’t like the Indiegogo platform, you can also give us money via PayPal instead: info [@] cbkcomics [.] comor meet us live, for example this weekend at Seriefest (or the official party Seriefestfesten at Hybriden on Saturday).

CBA has been around for a long time, publishing lots of great stories that move far outside of the commercial mainstream of comics.

For our upcoming volume, you can be a part of making it possible! We want to make this issue as awesome as humanly possible and that is why we need your funding (and also because we just lost the funding we’ve been relying on for many years).

We’re looking for donations to cover the costs of printing and distribution (and if we get some extra we might even be able to pay the rent) for the upoming CBA vol 36: In the pits of madness, featuring comics by Spyros Verykios, Akab, Elena Guidolin and Serena Schinaia, with a cover by Radovan Popović, edited by Mattias Elftorp.

Check out this promotional video, by Víctor Expolio, with music by Feberdröm and art from the book:

Horror meets madness and the inevitable collapse in this new volume of CBA, beautifully drawn and painted in heavy brush strokes and oil paint and sharp lines and halftones.

Let’s plunge together into the pits of madness. Let’s watch the dissolution of reality, let’s dance with clear heads and see where it takes us. Let’s travel the river hiding in the desert sands until the wind rises and we reach the final collapse. Let’s look deep into the eye of the tiger. And see afterwards if we dare to dream.

Some of the perks for donations (go to the campaign page for all the details):